Will We Ever See a Female ‘Doctor Who’? BBC Boss Hopes So

A female Time Lord for BBC’s “Doctor Who” is not out of the question, says the network’s director of television, Danny Cohen.

According to the U.K.’s Radio Times magazine, while at the a panel on Thursday for the Edinburgh Intl. Television Festival, Cohen was asked if he hopes to see a woman take on the famed role, to which he replied, “I hope so.”

Some fans of the show called for a female lead after the previous incarnation of the Doctor, Matt Smith, announced he was leaving the show in June 2013. Helen Mirren announced her desire to play the character in 2011, saying, “I would like to play the new female ‘Doctor Who.’ I don’t want to be just his sidekick.”

The show’s exec producer and head writer Steven Moffat has said in the past that he is not opposed to the idea of a female Doctor, but wouldn’t cast one simply for political reasons.

“Do you know how it will happen? It will not happen that somebody sits down and says we must turn the Doctor into a woman,” Moffat said in May at Wales’ Hay Festival. “That is not how you cast the Doctor. A person will pop into the showrunner’s head and they’ll think. ‘Oh, my God, what if it was that person?’ And when that person is a woman, that’s the day it will happen.”

Smith was eventually replaced by Peter Capaldi, who can be seen when the newest season of “Doctor Who” premieres Sunday on BBC America.

Oh pu-leeze . . . why not a Time Lady who is active on her own behalf? Let’s not sink into the quicksand of cultural acceptability. Writers have been creating powerful women characters long before the rhetoric on cultural acceptability cropped up (cf. Victorian novelists, for example).

Moffat has been vociferously opposed to casting a female actor as the Doctor. He only “auditioned” one person, Capaldi – by having him over to his house to mince and flounce about, to replace Smith, who was fired from the role of the Doctor so that BBC could sell ostensibly “complete” 50th Anniversary box set editions of Doctor Who.

Nope, In the episode where the tardis becomes a women (the doctors wife, written by Neil Gaiman and RTD) the dr finds a message from one of his old friends and mentions that he was girl in some of his regenerations.